The present disclosure relates generally to granule dispensers. In particular, granule dispensers for beverage granules, such as coffee, tea, and hot cocoa, are described herein.
Coffee, tea, and hot cocoa, are staple beverages in many cultures. Coffee is typically brewed by passing hot water over ground, roasted coffee beans. Tea is typically made by steeping ground tea leaves in hot water. Hot cocoa may be made by mixing cocoa powder with hot water. Ground coffee beans, ground tea leaves, and cocoa powder may be described as granules or beverage granules.
Machines designed to prepare a single serving of coffee, tea, hot cocoa, and other beverages have become popular. These machines make a single serving of a beverage by mixing hot water with granules of coffee, tea, or hot cocoa supplied to the machine, filtering the brewed beverage from the spent granules, and dispensing the brewed beverage into a beverage cup to be consumed by the user. A user can easily create a variety of beverages by simply changing the type, style, or brand of granule supplied to the machine. For example, a user may supply French roast coffee granules to the machine in the morning to make French roast coffee, supply hazelnut coffee granules to the machine in the afternoon to make hazelnut coffee, and supply green tea granules to the machine in the evening to make green tea.
Currently, a user often purchases a prepackaged, single serving, disposable container of granules to use with the machines. These disposable containers are typically made of plastic and are relatively expensive for the quantity of granules provided as compared to equivalent granules sold in multi-serving containers. Indeed, the expense per serving of the prepackaged, single use containers can be 10 times more expensive.
Further, the disposable nature of the prepackaged, single serving granule containers creates adverse environmental impacts. Similar to the problems associated with plastic water bottles, widespread use and subsequent disposal of the prepackaged, single serving granule containers adds significant quantities of avoidable refuse to landfills. Moreover, plastic containers are petroleum products with the attendant problems associated with petroleum being a limited resource and petroleum production contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.
As an alternative to prepackaged, disposable, single serving containers, reusable containers can be filled with granules by the user. However, this approach often creates a mess when the user attempts to transfer granules from a larger container to the single serving container. In particular, the size of single serving containers are typically small and transferring granules into the container with a scoop creates spills and overflow onto the counter.
Users find it difficult to reliably and accurately transfer the correct amount of granules to use in the single serving machine absent prepackaged granule containers. Transferring too many granules creates an undesirably strong beverage and transferring too few granules creates an undesirably weak beverage. Known methods do not allow for automatically dispensing a given quantity of granules into a reusable, single serving container.
In addition to being messy and imprecise, manually transferring granules to a reusable container by known methods is slow. Conventional processes are slow, in part, because the user must get everything ready each time a single serving of a beverage is desired. Indeed, known methods do not allow for staging of multiple servings of granules to be dispensed as needed, if more accurate quantities are desired, the known, manual techniques slow even more.
Thus, there exists a need for granule dispensers that improve upon and advance the design of known granule dispensers. Examples of new and useful granule dispensers relevant to the needs existing in the field are discussed below.